25 August 2021
Akkerman is an expert in the field of labour relations. She investigates how the way in which work is regulated (e.g. through labour law and collective labour agreements) impacts the relationships between employers and employees, and among employees themselves.
As a professor at the UvA, Akkerman will focus on interdisciplinary research and teaching in the field of labour regulation. Within the scope of her chair, she will promote new and groundbreaking research in this field in close cooperation with the interdisciplinary researchers at AIAS-HSI and fellow academics at Amsterdam Law School and at other faculties. With regards to education, Akkerman will develop interdisciplinary courses in the field of labour relation issues.
Akkerman has been professor of Labour Market Institutions and Industrial Relations at Radboud University Nijmegen since 2016. From 2015 until 2019, she also held the James Coleman chair in Sustainable Cooperation in Collective Labour Relations at the University of Groningen.
Akkerman’s teaching and research are highly multidisciplinary in nature. As a sociologist, she has worked closely with political scientists, scholars of public administration and business administration, philosophers, psychologists and economists for quite some time, including in educational initiatives such as the interfaculty course Work in the 21st Century and in research initiatives like the NWO’s Gravitation programme Scoop. In 2016, Akkerman received a Vici grant from the NWO for her interdisciplinary research project ‘Linking the discontented citizen and the discontented employee’.